Back in the winter of this year, I was poking around on Google maps looking for unexplored green space in Lancaster city, where we currently live. Zooming into the Northeast Quadrant, our corner of town, I found something that fit the bill (and then some). Little more than three blocks from our house was the terminus of a curved line of green, bending like a long crooked finger into the densely urban 6th Ward. I’d never noticed it before, and no label proclaimed it as a park. But its uneven color and raggedy edges all but confirmed a continuous tree canopy.

I studied the screen for a long time. It didn’t make sense that this much unused green space would be allowed to exist here, and nowhere else, under the radar. But from the satellite’s-eye view, it was perfect.

Around the same time, a book of historical atlases and maps of Lancaster came up for review for a potential reprint run at my work. Poring over the 1899 map of the 6th Ward, I saw what had to explain that raggedy green canopy: “Penna R. R.”, also known as the Pennsylvania Railroad.

The former strip of railroad had been deleted from the city core (though traces remain), but out on the northeast side? They let it be.

I decided to see it for myself. One afternoon in early March, while my wife and kids were on spring break in Florida and it was just me and my German Shepherd, Hertha, I parked in a strip mall just under a mile from our house, tucked back off of New Holland Pike. I opened the hatch, Hertha hopped out, and we were off.

I had just gotten off work. It was 5 or so. The late afternoon was bleak, but the plaza was bleaker, a tableau of cheap calories and desperate last resorts. There was a Chinese restaurant on the corner. Next in line was a Domino’s, then an Arabic market (the most enticing-looking thing—at least it was novel). Rounding the bend there was a Subway, a haircuts place, and then a temp agency. What looked like the former anchor of the plaza, maybe at one time a supermarket, with a crumbling roof feature topped laughably by a rooster weathervane, was now some nondescript “community services” facility.

Hertha leading me by his leash, we passed under an old drive-thru attached to the side of the Chinese restaurant, and thus crossed from the commercialized area of the strip mall into the non-commercialized space behind it — beyond the facades.

Evidently, I wasn’t the first: a footpath had been beaten into the grassy swale that marked out a reservoir basin, presumably built to drain water off the acre of parking lot. I wasn’t surprised to find the path; the neighborhood is a young and crowded one.

The path rose into a thicket, wherein the ground suddenly dropped into a gulch, at the bottom of which a dusty stream bed sloughed toward the railroad right-of-way. I went down. At the bottom I came face to face with a dark tunnel. I paused, then ducked between the bent-back edges of the chain-link fence and went inside.

A foul odor indicated hobo vagrancy. I aimed my feet for the driest parts of the floor, treading as I did so on indistinct lumps of decaying debris. A landslide obscured half the exit, forcing me to clamber up and out, helped along partly by the tugging of 80 pounds of straining dog muscle.

Once on the other side of the tunnel, I was surprised to see how badly damaged the structure was. Mortared stones reached out feebly into thin air, unable to connect to the rest of the arch. I wondered how how much longer the thing could stand. Looking at the ruin made me miss something I never even knew—the disrupted symmetry and material grandeur spoke of more rational times than these.

I looked around. I was in a strip of dusty, compacted earth between the abandoned railroad and a chain-link fence that marked the edge of the McCaskey High School campus. The ground rose sharply up to the grade of the railway, which shot narrow and flat both directions across my vision. Behind me, beyond the fence, there wasn’t much to see, but I knew that a green lawn opened out to a series of institutional buildings, some new, some midcentury. Where I was standing, there was a fire pit and some snack wrappers — evidence of a hangout of some kind.

It was already evening; there was a lot to take in. I wished I could split myself up and go in all directions at once, like Multiple Man from X-Force.

I decided to explore this lower area first, following a dry stream bed east through a second wall of steel fence, also peeled open, beyond which I found a trail. The sight of the tent — the first sure sign of current human occupation — stopped me cold. It stood pitched at the base of the railroad grade. Hertha and I watched for motion, but none came, nor any sound. I thought about investigating closer, but decided against it. It looked perfectly habitable and could easily have been where someone was living. And that’s what unnerved me—its sleek synthetic non-ruin-ness didn’t belong here. I had no desire to disturb the kind of person who had chosen the wasteland as his home. This place was on the lam’s on the lam. Besides, I wanted to get up to the old railway.

I turned back and took advantage of the stair-step buttress of the archway to climb the slope, and where it ended I mountaineered myself the rest of the way up using the trunks of trees clinging to the hillside. At the top, I started east on the trail, made of uncovered dirt and slate stones. Soon I came upon a pile of discarded personal effects — an Altoids tin, socks, a wallet crafted out of colorful duct tape — that made me wonder again who came to this place. As with the tent, I was curious about the life behind the material. The thought crossed my mind that maybe the person who had left the pile was dead, or missing. I hiked on.

The detritus of unparticular, tenuous human occupation, melded with the buried mystery of the railway and the standoffish institutional architecture just beyond the fence, created a pervasive sense of marginality, of ambiguity. Claimed by no one, open to anyone’s use in any fashion they could imagine, with no cues indicating a purpose for the space or a destination for the path, the space made me feel untethered from city life, as though I had set myself adrift on a smooth, silent current running deep out of the city core. It was exciting. A little unnerving, too. I was glad I had my dog.

Farther along the path I found myself ducking under and jumping over blowdown and pushing aside vines. The trail itself, however, was sturdy and soft underfoot, and flat and easy to follow — as good as the easiest parts of the Appalachian Trail.

Through the bare trees I could see the guarded and maintained institutional space of the high school below me and to my right, and to my left (north), parking lots came nearly to the base of the grade. I passed the backs of the last nondescript buildings as the strip of woods meanwhile grew thinner and thinner.

I came out of the woods within close view of the Norfolk Southern/Amtrak line that runs straight across the shoulder of the northeast side of town (see the map and aerial view above). Wondering if I could get in trouble if the crew of a passing train saw me, I crossed an open rocky expanse. There was still enough light to keep on, and nothing to stop me from doing so, so I kept walking, entering a wild-looking grassy meadow that went parallel to the tracks. The clouds hung low; it was mild and moist — a hiker’s day. A column of great pylons carrying power lines signified industrial semi-occupation; the sun-dried animal bones (at least I hope they were animal bones) lying on top of the grass reminded me it was an unmanaged realm. Nothing moved. Clumpy, spreading bushes partially hid me from view of the tracks.

According to the historical maps I would read later I had already passed the old city line, about when I had taken the archway steps. In fact, I suspect that the tunnel once served horse and buggy and foot traffic traveling north and south along one of the streets, maybe Broad Street. Lining up the old maps and the current satellite map, it’s the only explanation that makes sense. Now, Broad Street is just part of the city — except where it vanishes, under the high school’s grounds.

As I kept on, even with the awareness that a large population of people was never far from me, I felt as though I were walking on some celestial highway into the wild. At the end of the meadow the land suddenly dropped off precipitously down to the Conestoga River. But the railroad kept going, crossing a very old stone bridge. The bridge looked of a similar architectural formula as the crumbling archway—old and heavy, with regular rounded arches.

Nothing else to do, we crossed the active track and explored the woods on the other side. In it I found a tall canopy, bundles of rubber tubing forgotten on the ground, and a second hobo campsite. We gave the campsite a wide berth and retraced our steps, back across the meadow and back into the abandoned wooded railway.

*          *          *

Once upon a time, the overgrown footpath had been a railway—the old P & C, the Philadelphia and Columbia Railroad, later the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR). The Main Line. Where I was now ducking vines and scanning the horizon for vagrants, passengers once rode the iron horse from Lancaster to Philadelphia decked out in their old-timey best, eager to disembark at Broad and Vine and taste the big city air.

I was, in fact, hiking along one of the earliest railroad routes on the North American continent.

In the early 19th century competition was high among east coast cities, acting as sentient collections of capital, to move goods and people to and from industrial centers situated in the newly settled West. To the north, the Erie Canal opened for business in 1825. Three years later and to the south, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad broke ground, upping the ante from boat to locomotive. It was boom times for nation expansion — my own ancestors had already bundled their way en masse to the erstwhile frontier. Philadelphia, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, wanted in.

Under the auspices of the Main Line of Public Works, which, in a dream of old and new technological possibilities, conceived of a hybrid canal/railroad route linking the Schuykill to the Susquehanna, the P & C began construction on an 82-mile line that would connect Philadelphia to Lancaster and then to Columbia. When the route opened five years later, in 1834, the first railcars were a mix of steam — a new, unproven technology at the time — and horse-drawn. Regulation made steam engines the status quo ten years later, right about the time that Thoreau removed to his cabin on Walden Pond and Hawthorne lamented such monstrous industrial intrusion on Nature, as Leo Marx notes in The Machine in the Garden.

The inaugural train passed through Lancaster city on October 7, 1834, carrying the governor and his men from Columbia to Philadelphia. The Age of the Train had begun, and with it, the sounds of modernity rang through the outskirts of Lancaster city.

In 1854, the much larger PRR bought the P & C and made improvements on the route that now ran the width of the Commonwealth, including replacing the passenger terminal in downtown Lancaster. The new station, built in 1861 on the eve of the Civil War, was a sumptuous piece of architecture. Long and wide with an arching roof rising gracefully from a row of columns lining Chestnut Street, the west end of the building opening out on North Queen Street, a radial arrangement of column work added beauty to the ends of the roof. Its destiny was to become a parking lot.

But for 68 years, Lancastrians enjoyed having a passenger rail station smack in the center of town; from it, they could reach any city they could think of, they could people-watch as trains from the state capitol or Philadelphia puffed in. But as the Train Age and the Age of the Automobile overlapped, the city center became a contested space. The trains gave way, moving to what was formerly a backup station just north of the city, where the current (and really quite beautiful) Amtrak station stands now. In 1929, the station on Queen and Chestnut was torn down.

Today there is now a multistory commercial building where it once stood. The ground floor is occupied by a regional brewpub chain, and the upper floors seem to be some sort of hotel space and then possibly a parking garage. It’s not much to look at—a sheer cliff wall of impermeable space with utility fixings poking out here and there. It erases history; it eschews form and place. Unsurprisingly, the building is new. Sonja recalls that the space used to be a parking lot; she would park there with her parents to go to the movies at a downtown cinema (that no longer exists, but is now the site of the Queen Street bus terminal).

It’s a common story among American cities, as Larry R. Ford writes in The Spaces Between Buildings:

Since at least the 1920s, we have been developing new and often conflicting policies for trying to move people, cars, buses, and trucks through urban spaces. Every couple of decades planners arrive at ideologies and role models that seem to assure us that we have finally found the solution, only to wake up and find the resulting disappointments, if not disasters, a few years later. We need to monitor the staying power of various types of urban morphology. (180–181)

The destruction of the station presumably meant that the curving line into the heart of the city had become redundant overnight. Into the absence of the train the wild fringes of nature have slowly taken over. The shape of the old Main Line remained, however, etched into the landscape and into the built environment. The cycle was complete—wild space, claimed and reshaped space, industrialized and regulated and monetized space, obsolescence, neglect, and ruin.

*          *          *

When I returned to the abandoned railway in late May, on a rainy Memorial Day morning before 7 a.m., a thick and heavy poison ivy vine hung in front of the entrance to tunnel like a natural No Trespassing sign. As before, it was just me and Hertha; my plan was to get out early and be back for breakfast.

I looked for the tent again. Taking advantage of a muddy pallet someone had set across the stream where the fence was torn, I walked into the flat bottom woods. A tent was still there. But I wasn’t certain it was the same tent I’d seen before; this tent was blue, not the orange one I remembered from my trek in March. That same air of extreme, guarded privacy precluded me from going closer to it. The mystery of who was in the tent, or at least who had set it up, would have to remain unsolved. As before, I turned back and climbed up the side of the railroad to get to the trail.

I found the path teaming with life. An undergrowth of honeysuckle, poison ivy, and brambles created a tunnel of green punctuated by red wild strawberries and the various whites and purples of four-petaled dame’s rockets. To my surprise, I found the pale disk of sawn log where some trail caretaker had reclaimed the right-of-way from a fallen tree.

The previous night’s rain slicked the leaves and tinted everything dark and full. Drops would hit me whenever the wind shook the trees. A female cardinal, ochre-colored, sang to me from the branches; it had to be singing to me — there was no one else!

I had that feeling that you get from the trail, of being pressed between earth and sky and pushed in no direction at all; of miles ahead and miles behind, of plain linear continuance in a four-dimensional world. This time, knowing the trail from experience, I had the pleasure of seeing in my mind how the landscape would turn out, and how it would always be here and turn out, in a cyclical fashion, according to the seasons. There is a happiness to be found in ruins. By forcing us to confront the material ridges and hollows of earlier “urban morpholog[ies]”, as Larry R. Ford would say, they show us how to imagine better futures.

References

Ford, Larry R. The Spaces Between Buildings. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2000.

Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden.

For a shallow dive into the history of the trains traveling through Lancaster, have a look at these websites (and enjoy the additional historical photographs).